Monday, March 31, 2008

George Carlin and Grace Lee Boggs have been coming up again and again recently. First found this video above at De Tod@s Para Tod@s and then went to an Earthdriver show just days later to find DJ Oja was scratching up the audio to great effect. It was a real pleasure to be in Grace Lee Bogg's presence during the Left Forum... my favorite memory with her was from her "toast" at the Brecht Forum party where she asked the crowd, "How many people are over ninety?!" That's the most baller sh*t I've seen in a while...

In this way, somewhere between Carlin's bitter humor and Boggs' visionary leadership, we might just find...

The Next American Revolution

Despite the huge differences in local conditions, our Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with the struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the 1917 Russian Revolution because it involves a paradigm shift in the concept of revolution.

I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.

I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country’s history – when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama’s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims — without discussing the next American revolution.

Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven’t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.

****I begin with some history. Forty years ago my late husband, Jimmy Boggs, and I started Conversations in Maine with our old friends and comrades, Freddy and Lyman Paine, to explore how a revolution in our time in our country would differ from the many revolutions that took place around the world in the early and mid-20th century.

We four had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a tiny group inside the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party, led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Lyman, an architect, and Freddy, a worker and organizer, had been in the radical movement since the 1930s. Jimmy, an African American born and raised in the deep agricultural South, had worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years and was a labor and community activist and writer. I was an Asian American intellectual who had been inspired by the 1941 March on Washington movement to become a movement activist, and after spending ten years in New York studying Marx and Lenin with CLR and Raya, had moved to Detroit in 1953, married Jimmy Boggs and became involved in the struggles organically developing in the Detroit community.

Our mantra in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had been the famous paragraph in Capital where Marx celebrates “the revolt of the working class always increasing in numbers and united, organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production.” In the early 60s when the working class was decreasing rather than increasing under the impact of what we then called “automation,” we separated from CLR when he opposed our decision to rethink Marxism.

Our separation freed us to recognize unequivocally that we were coming to the end of the relatively short industrial epoch on which Marx’s epic analysis had been based. We could see clearly that the United States was in the process of transitioning to a new mode of production, based on new informational technologies, and that this transitioning was not only epoch-ending but epoch-opening, with cultural and political ramifications as far-reaching as those involved in the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture or from Agriculture to Industry.

As movement activists and theoreticians in the tumultuous year of 1968, we were also acutely conscious that in the wake of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the exploding anti-Vietnam war and women’s movements, new and more profound questions of our relationships with one another, with Nature, and with other countries were being raised with a centrality unthinkable in earlier revolutions.

Hence, as our conversations continued, we became increasingly convinced that our revolution in our country in the late 20th century had to be radically different from the revolutions that had taken place in pre-or-non-industrialized countries like Russia, Cuba, China or Vietnam. Those revolutions had been made not only to correct injustices but to achieve rapid economic growth. By contrast, as citizens of a nation which had achieved its rapid economic growth and prosperity at the expense of African Americans, Native Americans, other people of color, and peoples all over the world, our priority had to be correcting the injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries and with the Earth.

In other words, our revolution had to be for the purpose of accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of humanity. That’s why we called our philosophy “Dialectical Humanism” as contrasted with the “Dialectical Materialism” of Marxism.

Six years later the practical implications of this somewhat abstract concept of an American revolution were spelled out by Jimmy in the chapter entitled “ Dialectics and Revolution” in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

“The revolution to be made in the United States,” Jimmy wrote, nearly 30 years before 9/11, “will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death.” Until that takes place, “this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present.”

“It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the people of the United States for these new social goals.” Jimmy continued. “But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed.” Thus, the American revolution, at this stage in our history and in the evolution of technology and of the human race, is not about Jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans enjoy middle class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South, and also slow down global warming. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living which is dependent upon Empire. About practicing a new more active, global and participatory concept of citizenship. About becoming the change we want to see in the world.

The courage, commitment and strategies required for this kind of revolution are very different from those required to storm the Kremlin or the White House. Instead of viewing the American people as masses to be mobilized in increasingly aggressive struggles for higher wages, better jobs or guaranteed health care, we must have the courage to challenge them and ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world and our planet.

This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations calling on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, while not supporting the terrorists, understand that they were driven to these acts by anger at the U.S. role in the world, e.g. supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, overthrowing or seeking to overthrow democratically-elected governments, and treating whole countries, the world’s peoples and Nature only as a resource enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life.

We have to help the American people find the moral strength to recognize that, although no amount of money can compensate for the countless deaths and indescribable suffering that our criminal invasion and occupation have caused the Iraqi people, we, the American people, have a responsibility to make the material sacrifices that will help them rebuild their infrastructure. We have to help the American people grow their souls (which is not a noun but a verb) enough to recognize that since we, who are only 4% of the world’s population, have been consuming 25% of the planet’s resources, we are the ones who must take the first big steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are the ones who must live more simply so that others can simply live.

Moreover, we need to begin creating ways to live more frugally and cooperatively NOW because as times get harder, we “good Americans,” if we view ourselves only as victims, can easily slip into scapegoating the “other” and goose-stepping behind a nationalist leader, as the “good Germans” did in the 1930s, with Hitler.

This vision of an American revolution as transformation is the one projected by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his April 4, 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech. As Vincent Harding, Martin’s close friend and colleague, put it recently on Democracy Now, King was calling on us to redeem the soul of America. Speaking for the weak, the poor, the despairing and the alienated, in our inner cities and in the rice paddies of Vietnam, he was urging us to become a more mature people by making a radical revolution not only against racism but against materialism and militarism. He was challenging us to “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”

King was assassinated before he could devise concrete ways to move us towards this radical revolution of values. But why haven’t we who think of ourselves as American radicals picked up the torch? Is it because a radical revolution of values against racism, militarism and materialism is beyond our imaginations, even though we are citizens of a nation with 700 military bases whose unbridled consumerism imperil the planet?

***In Detroit we are engaged in this “long and beautiful struggle for a new world,” not because of King’s influence (we identified more with Malcolm) but because we have learned through our own experience that just changing the color of those in political power was not enough to stem the devastation of our city resulting from deindustrialization.

Our campaign involves rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up: growing food on abandoned lots, reinventing education to include children in community-building, creating co-operatives to produce local goods for local needs, developing Peace Zones to transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets, replacing punitive justice with Restorative Justice programs to keep non-violent offenders in our communities and out of prisons that not only misspend billions much needed for roads and schools but turn minor offenders into hardened criminals.

It is a multigenerational campaign, involving the very old as well as the very young, and all the inbetweens, especially the Millennial generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, whose aptitude with the new communications technology empowers them to be remarkably self-inventive and multi-tasking and to connect and reconnect 24/7 with individuals near and far.

Despite the huge differences in local conditions, our Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with the struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the 1917 Russian Revolution because it involves a paradigm shift in the concept of revolution.

One way to understand the paradigm shift is by contrasting our vision of health in a revolutionary America with the health care programs offered by the Democratic presidential front-runners.

Hillary’s and Obama’s “health care” programs are really insurance programs having more to do with feeding the already monstrous medical-industrial complex than with our physical, mental and spiritual health. By contrast, once we understand that our schools are in such crisis because they were created a hundred years ago in the industrial epoch to prepare children to become cogs in the economic machine; once we recognize that our challenge in the 21st century is to engage our children from K-12 in problem-solving and community-building activities, our children and young people will become participants in caring for their own health and that of our families and communities. Eating food they’ve grown for themselves, creating and sharing information from the Net, and organizing health festivals for the community, they will not only be caring for their own health. They will be helping to heal our communities.

This kind of transformation is what the next American revolution is about. It is not a single event but a process. It involves all of us, from many different walks of life, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, faiths. At the same time, based on our experiences in Detroit and the panels I attended at this weekend’s Forum, I see the Millennial generation playing a pivotal role. As Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it.”

With their January 1st, 1994 uprising -on the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect- the Zapatistas helped to kick-off the ongoing global cycle of struggle against free trade agreements (referred to as "FTAs") and supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

With the WTO, IMF, World Bank and regional free trade agreements such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) greatly weakened or non-functional thanks to global resistance, neoliberal capitalists have shifted their focus to securing bi-lateral free trade agreements. These agreements are being strongly resisted in many places around the world and now there is a print and web-based project, Fighting FTAs, that is helping to gather, create, circulate, and organize the knowledge needed to defeat these destructive projects... check it out, use it, pass it on.

The Left Forum was pretty dang PACKED this year... and so was the Brecht Forum on Saturday night where the youth and the elders (Tariq Ali, Grace Lee Boggs, Ashanti Alston, and Max Elbaum amongst them) joined together in an historic force to "Party Like It's 1968!" Now let's see if some of that spirit will spill into the streets this week marking the 5th Anniversary of the US-led Invasion of Iraq...

Leading up to all the Left/Brecht Forum madness over the weekend was another packed event at the Brecht called "Prospects for a More Coherent Left: An Intergenerational Dialogue from the Grassroots" featuring a discussion between Max Elbaum, Ai-Jen Poo, Autumn Brown and I - you can find the audio here. Now here's a sampling of...'Zapatismo in NYC' events this Spring

Monday, March 03, 2008

Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB), adherents to the Other Campaign in New York City, are inviting all of us to join the support network for their International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio... Please read the Declaration below, respond to MJB directly, and spread their Declaration as far and wide as possible!

There are also a lot of other interesting and important things to highlight this week: The Cucapa and Kumiai Indigenous Communities of Baja California, Mexico -also adherents to the Other Campaign- are seeking support in their struggle for autonomy and self-determination; Anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups from across the Northeast and Midwest USA have initiated the Solidarity Without Borders Campaign in solidarity with immigrant and indigenous struggles throughout the Americas; Here are two articles (1,2) covering the recent NYC presentation from CAPISE on repression against the zapatista communities; and, last but not least, Slingshot Hip Hop is having its NYC premiere on April 5th and 6th as part of the MoMA's New Directors/New Films Exhibition... tickets go on sale March 7th - Also cop the latest issue of VIBE Magazine with 50 and De Niro on the cover... you'll notice it says "Intifada Hip Hop" in the top right corner :-)

International Declaration in Defense of El Barrio(En Español Abajo)

For Movement for Justice in El Barrio, the struggle for justice means fighting for the liberation of women, immigrants, lesbians, people of color, gays and the transgender community. We all share a common enemy and its called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wishes to divide us and keep us from combining our forces. We will defeat this by continuing to unite all of our communities until we achieve true liberation for all.

Movement for Justice in El Barrio is fighting against neoliberal gentrification in our neighborhood, a process that is better understood by we, the humble and simple people who are affected by it, as the displacement of families from their homes for being poor, immigrants and people of color.

This displacement is created by the greed, ambition and violence of a global empire of money that seeks to take total control of all the land, labor and life on earth. Here in El Barrio (East Harlem, New York City), landlords, multi-national corporations and local, state, and federal politicians and institutions want to force upon us their culture of money, they want to displace poor families and rent their apartments to rich people, white people with money. They want to change the look of our neighborhood, with the excuse of “developing the community.” They want to remove from the street the street vendors, who earn an honorable and dignified living, the families that have their small businesses and small restaurants, small clothing stores, and the small bodegas on the corners in our neighborhood. They want to displace us to bring in their luxury restaurants, their expensive and large clothing stores, their supermarket chains. They want to change our neighborhood. They want to change our culture. They want to change that which makes us Latino, African-American, Asian and Indigenous. They want to change everything that makes us El Barrio.

Now the multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation Dawnay, Day Group, is waging a war against our community from their headquarters across the ocean in London. Dawnay, Day Group recently bought 47 buildings in El Barrio with the sole purpose of forcing us from our homes in order to increase their profits. Our struggle to fight back must also cross oceans and cross borders and that is why we are launching our “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio.” Gentrification is one of the devastating manifestations of neoliberalism at the local level, but the threat transcends borders. Governments and institutions all over the world are sanctioning the violent, unjust, and inhumane displacement of people and communities from their rightful homes.

Together, we make our dignity resistance and we fight back against the actions of capitalist landlords and multinational corporations who are displacing poor families from our neighborhood. We fight back locally and across borders. We fight back against local politicians that refuse to govern by obeying the will of the people. We fight back against the government institutions that enforce a global economic, social and political system that seeks to destroy humanity.

We fight so that:

The oceans and mountains will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The rivers and deserts will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The valleys and ravines will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

Homes and cities will belong to those who live in and take care of them.

No one will own more land than they can cultivate.

No one will own more homes than they can live in.

We are calling on all people of good conscience to support us in this fight. A fight against this global empire of money. A fight against neoliberalism. A fight for humanity.

As part of our “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio,” we are organizing on a transnational level to combat displacement in El Barrio and we hope to build a multi-national network of allies and supporters who will stand by and support us in our struggle as we expand our resistance to take on Dawnay, Day Group in London and any other global, national or local threat to our right to dignified housing, autonomy and self-determination.

We are calling on all people of good conscience to support our struggle against the forces that seek to destroy our community by becoming allies to our “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio.”

From El Barrio, New York.Movement for Justice in El BarrioMarch, 2008

How can you support? Please email us with your response to the options listed below and your name, the name of your group, your address, and your phone number.

1. I or my group, endorse the principles laid out in the International Declaration in Defense of El Barrio and would like to join a network of supporters.

2. I will attend the launching of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio on the steps on NYC City Hall on Sunday, April 6th 2008, at 12:30 PM.

3. I will attend a protest in NYC organized by Movement for Justice in El Barrio

4. I will host and financially sponsor an educational forum in my community on Movement for Justice in El Barrio’s International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio.

5. I will organize a Movement for Justice in El Barrio support committee in my community or on my campus.

6. I will host and sponsor a benefit for Movement for Justice in El Barrio.

7. I am willing to make a donation to the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio.

For More Info Contact Us at (212) 561-0555 or movementforjusticeinelbarrio@yahoo.com